Don't you think I was too young
To be messed with?

He's lost when he sees her. He's drowning in a world of gray, a world filled with nothing but pain and loss. And he sees her and all he can see are colors. With a gun tucked into the waistband of his jeans and a knife strapped to his ankle, he's nothing but darkness. But she's… She's that silly cliché, that the sight of something beautiful can heal any scar.

Yellow hair, curling and unruly from the humidity, tumbles around her shoulders. Her dress is red and blue. Her laugh is every color of the rainbow.

It's a flower stall of all things, in the middle of a Saturday street market. He's got blood on his hands, literally, he wiped it on his dark cargo pants, but he can still feel it on his fingers. He's left a man dead mere minutes before, a bad man, a man who brought more pain to more people than Oliver ever has, but a man nonetheless. He snuffed a light out without flinching, only to walk out into the sunshine and stumble upon the brightest star he's ever seen.

He hates himself with every step he takes towards her. Hates to watch the darkness that travels with him like a cloud draw close to something so innocent.

She's young, younger than him, too young to be messed with by someone as damaged as he. Too young to be broken. Too young to be obliterated.

But he doesn't stop walking closer.

She talks to everyone who approaches her stall, with a smile on lips that seem to run away from her at every opportunity. She blushes too. Her cheeks turning pink, animated hands with painted nails punctuating everything she says with a gesture.

There's a boy sitting to her right, and a dog standing alert to her left. Oliver's glad she has protectors; maybe they'll stop him before he can turn all those colors dark.

He's too close. Too close to losing the last shred of him that still remembers what it means to be human, that still remembers the things that matter. There's a horrible, selfish part of him that thinks maybe she's exactly what he needs. Someone beautiful and light to fix him before it's too late.

He reaches her before he can turn back, and then that smile is directed at him and his heart is doing things it hasn't done in years.

"Hi! What are you looking for today?" She's so goddamn perky, so full of life and joy and it hurts him as much as it heals him.

He needs to leave.

He should walk away, right now.

But he doesn't. It's warm in her bubble of sunlight.

His eyes find hers. Blue and clear and endless.

And unseeing.

She looks right at him, but there's no focus in her gaze. Perhaps that's why she's still smiling at him, she hasn't seen the wreck of a man that stands before her. She doesn't know to shrink away in fear, from someone so clearly dangerous.

Because she can't see him.

"A gift for a girlfriend?" She wonders, fingers tapping against lightly against the table.

It takes him a long moment to find his voice, and when he does it's raspy and hoarse.

"No, nothing like that. I…" He looks down at the flowers in front of him, buckets of them in every color and shape he can think of. He can only name one or two different varieties, a distant memory of his mother fussing over an ornate vase filled with carnations and roses. "Could I have one of each?"

She arches an eyebrow at him and tilts her head to the side, her eyes blink up at him and he gazes back, wondering how it could be possible that something so expressive is without sight. Her lips curl up into a smile, and he feels like she's learning his every secret with one look… sound, sense?

"One of each? I like it." She says, and he finds himself smiling back at her.

It's a barely-there lift of his lips but it's more than he's done in longer than he cares to remember. For a beautiful blind girl in the middle of a Saturday street market.

He's aware of the boy to her side watching him carefully, and the dog, a guide dog he realizes now, resting its head against her leg, but all he can focus on is her. Delicate hands quickly pluck a flower from each bucket, confident and unfaltering. And he watches as the colors come together, a mismatched bouquet that's everything he isn't.

It's beautiful.

He's going to take it and leave. He'll keep the memory of her little patch of sunlight and nothing more. He'll turn around and walk back the way he came, back to the mission, back to his life of following orders and losing his soul. Whatever's left of it.

He won't drag her down with him. This beautiful enigma, a little shard of hope.

He'll take the flowers and leave.

But then her fingers brush his as she hands him the bouquet, and his feet forget how to move.

"I'm Oliver."